Blog

Betting on Black Friday Bedlam

by Michelle McLean, posted on Monday, June 5, 2017

Every year, multiple retailers duke it out for worst outage of the online holiday shopping season. This year, as ScaleArc has already started working with clients on prepping for the Black Friday traffic onslaught, we thought it’d be fun to get ahead of the game, asking folks now about failures they anticipate next November.

To learn more, we ran a quick “Christmas in May” survey, asking which retailers people expect to be impacted. Turns out, the majority of Americans (52 percent) do indeed expect that a top retailer will have an online meltdown during this fall’s holiday shopping season.

Walmart took top prize on the list of retailers expected to have a major outage this holiday season – here’s how some of the big retailers stack up:

Walmart – 23%

Best Buy – 17%

Macy’s – 16%

Target – 16%

Amazon – 14%

Costco – 7%

And disgruntled shoppers won’t go quietly into that good night – more than half said they take an action:

leave the website – 26%

visit a competitor’s website – 21%

We’ve seen the Black Friday disasters up close – and we want to help retailers avoid the same fate. So often the database is the culprit – it’s the hardest part of the technology stack to scale, and even when it’s got resiliency built in, it’s hard to enable apps to leverage that automatic failover.

To help retailers, we solicited best practices from our many retail and SaaS customers who routinely experience significant traffic spikes and pulled together the findings into our “Black Friday Prep Checklist.” You can also check out this infographic that pulls the best practices into a clock timeline.

Now’s the time to make sure your IT team is taking all the steps they can to avoid downtime during the Black Friday onslaught.